On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 01:18:06PM -0800, John Byrne wrote:
> Do you have any interest in doing away with the concept of major and
> minor numbers altogether; turning the dev_t into an opaque unique id?
>
> At the application level, the kinds of information that is derived from
> the major/minor number should probably be derived in some other manner
> such as a library or system call. Code that determines device type by
> comparing with the major/minor numbers should probably be discouraged in
> the long run and this could be a good time to start.
Programs that use explicit major/minor information are probably broken
or at least very nonportable.
On the other hand, unfortunately the Unix API has a few explicit
occurrences of major/minor. For example, one has ls(1) and mknod(1).
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 31 2001 - 21:00:15 EST